I started attending photography classes with a successful photographer and there's couple of things I was apparently doing very, very wrong. I do not want to question the photographer knowledge, but more so just to ask for "2nd opinion".
1.Studio portraits should only be taken with aperture of 5.6 or higher.
Is this true and does the same apply for outdoor portraits? Most of my outdoor portraits were taken with aperture 1.4 to 2.8, mostly because of less than optimal lighting conditions and I just love this beautiful bokeh.
- I am apparently supposed to use viewfinder only and not camera screen to frame the pictures, with both eyes open to see the model. Also taping the screen to correct the focus is a no-no.
I was usually only using the screen since I lack the mobility (really bad knees injuries), so I preferred moving the camera around instead of my entire body to frame the pictures, having eye contact with the model is also easier this way for me. The focus on camera is also often not perfect and being able to quickly "correct it" by telling camera where to focus is very, very useful.
- Using tons of lights and equipment to get desired results. The photographer that leads the lectures is very fixated on complicating the scene by using multiple of expensive lights and giant reflectors.
Personally I don't own a ton of equipment, so I always look a ways to achieve things without resorting to that many lights and reflectors and usually I can find people being able to achieve those results with two or even one light, simply by adjusting the angle, distance or power of the light.
I absolutely understand that more equipment offers more possibilities, but I just feel like it's sometimes unnecessarily complicated by some photographers.
- Having a large team of assistants. Last lesson we were split us into groups and had role assigned to each of us. Two people responsible for lights, director, photographer and so on. According to our teacher and the way he teaches us, having group of assistants is necessary or at least highly advised.
As someone who only ever worked alone (excluding the models of course) and plans to work alone in foreseeable future, I am not sure what to think of that.
- DSLR are better because they are more stable due to their heavier weight, compared to lighter mirrorless cameras. Also apparently information displayed on mirrorless cameras is lagging behind compared to DSLR, but I am not exactly sure what he was talking about.
I think everyone here covered most of the points. Just hope you got your money's worth from the lessons. I'm a hobbyist photographer and I've also paid to attend 2 workshops so far, a basic photography workshop and a couple's outdoor portrait photography workshop. For the second workshop, the instructor had more experience in wedding and family shoots so his method was totally opposite of what your instructor taught. He only used one external flash sometimes and had a couple of assistants with him but they were not critical, we spent most of the workshop using shooting in natural light and only used the flash after sunset. In any case, I find that after learning about the fundamentals of exposure triangle and how they affect your photos. Everything else has to be learnt through trial and error and practice. There are plenty of free and good resources online and YouTube. Paying to attend a Professional-run course is only useful if you want to gain some first-hand insights in that industry, to understand the workflows and expectations required. Which would be the roleplaying and use of lighting in your case. However, the instructor's opinions on rules regarding dslrs and apertures are just his opinions and are not absolute.